Culture
Jannik Sinner has been biding his time. Is that time now?
Jannik Sinner speaks in a soft monotone, whether in his native Italian or his thoughtful, halting English.
A clenched fist by his belly is about all the emotion he lets anyone see on the court.
Nobody would describe anything about him as flashy; not his tennis game, not his wardrobe — which includes a lot of sweatpants and T-shirts — and not his quiet life off the court. He has freckles and a mop of wavy red hair.
Before we go much further, it’s probably healthy to add a disclaimer. We know this story is going to rely on some cultural stereotypes and generalizations about large populations in some of the biggest countries in Europe, or at least large populations of tennis players from those countries. We know there are exceptions. Many of them.
In this case, they are useful nevertheless because there is a well-earned stereotype of an Italian tennis player. They have a kind of flair lacing through their personalities and their games, whether it’s Matteo Berrettini’s booming serve or Lorenzo Musetti’s flashy backhand or the way Fabio Fognini zipped and zagged and mouthed around the court, never leaving any mystery about what he was thinking or feeling at any given moment.
If you understand Italian, you get an earful of colorful language from watching them play. When you watched these men or, in the past, Flavia Pennetta or Francesca Schiavone, there wasn’t any doubt you were watching a tennis player from Italy.
Sinner, left, and Lorenzo Musetti with last year’s Davis Cup trophy (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images for ITF)
Sinner, the 22-year-old former junior skiing champion who beat the 10-time Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic in four sets on Friday, is not that. At least not on the outside.
There’s a fairly good reason for this, according to those who know him and Italy best. Sinner comes from the small town of San Candido in the northeast corner of Italy, a region tucked next to, and with plenty of cultural commonality with, Austria and the slightly further afield Germany.
“It’s a different part of Italy,” said Simone Vagnozzi, Sinner’s main coach during the past year. Italians from that region, Vagnozzi said, are very serious. “They don’t speak so much.”
Don’t get Vagnozzi wrong. In a quiet setting — around the hotel, or playing cards or golf (the other game that his other tennis guru, the veteran coach and commentator Darren Cahill, is trying to teach him) — Sinner is quick with a joke.
“So it’s really serious on the court when he practices, and this is maybe the German part of him. But he is also really funny, and this is more the Italian part,” Vagnozzi said.
This was just after Sinner crashed his coaches’ post-match news conference Friday, demanding that he be given a chance to ask the question of what it was really like to coach Jannik Sinner.
“It’s a crappy job,” Cahill answered. “We are not paid enough. The guy gives us a hard time all the time, and he’s forever actually taking our money in card games, and he gets a lot of enjoyment about that stuff.”
“Finally, the truth comes out,” Sinner said, then turned and left the room.
Jannik Sinner, breakout tennis star and understated Gucci model (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for Gucci)
Sinner can often come across like a contradiction. His father is a chef and his mother waited tables in the restaurant where her husband cooked, providing Jannik with a comfortable but humble upbringing. He is a Gucci model and a Rolex ambassador. But catch him on a late summer afternoon after a morning of training at a mansion in the Hamptons during his preparations for the U.S. Open and he’s in sweats and a T-shirt and big, black-rimmed glasses, a bit amazed by, and shaking his head at, his surroundings.
Most people don’t see those parts of Sinner — the joker or the simple young man who will always think of himself as the son of hard-working restaurant staff.
They see the face on the fascia billboards and the silent thinker who watched the two other top players of his generation, Carlos Alcaraz and Holger Rune, burst past him in 2022, even though Sinner had made the quarterfinals of the French Open as a 19-year-old, which got him labelled as a ‘next big thing’.
Sinner, aged 19, lost to Rafael Nadal in the 2020 French Open quarterfinals (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Sinner preached patience. The coach who had raised him, Riccardo Piatti, the 65-year-old tennis sage known as one of the top minds in the game, had always told him to treat his first 150 tour matches as a learning experience.
To the outside world, Sinner talked in that passive monotone about the process of evolving into a top tennis player. Inside, in the quiet settings, he was thinking something else, and it was no joking matter.
One day, early in 2022, Sinner fired Piatti and his entire coaching team, replacing them with Vagnozzi, a new fitness trainer and physiotherapist, before this year, adding Cahill for his experience working with top players, including Simona Halep and Lleyton Hewitt.
All of them, most of all Sinner, have set themselves the task of turning Sinner into a more versatile player, someone who could do more than smack the ball from the baseline like a bot on a tennis video game. It was a two-step-forward-one-step-back approach to his career. His ranking slipped to 15 at the end of 2023 and from 10 at the end of 2022.
Still, he talked about patience and process. Inside, it was killing him. He saw Alcaraz winning Grand Slam titles and Rune leapfrogging him in the rankings as he tried to add weight, endurance and variety to his game. Would the work ever pay off?
“Patience can be your biggest enemy in one way, because if you’re not that patient, you rush in one way, and then you forget maybe some steps that you should do to become a better player, to become better physically,” Sinner said on Friday evening. “Then at some point, I don’t know, I feel like on the level what we are seeing now from my side is because of a whole year of work, and the process of what we have made to become the best version of what I am right now.”
“Patience is not easy to handle,” he added, “It’s also practice.”
This is where Cahill has been most helpful, as a calming influence, Sinner said, someone who can keep the balance between the quiet Germanic exterior and the playful and passionate Italian interior. The son of an Australian rules football coach, Cahill has learned the right moments to say the right words to Sinner.
Coach Darren Cahill and Sinner at last year’s Wimbledon (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
They talked little about tennis for hours before Friday’s match against Djokovic. “Then 20 minutes before the match, we talked about tactics, how to handle certain situations,” Sinner said. “Cahill helped not only me but the whole team to believe in ourselves, but also to enjoy, because we travel so much around the world, and to enjoy the time together is really important.”
On Sunday, he will face Daniil Medvedev in his first Grand Slam final.
The hard work has paid off.
(Top photo: Nicolo Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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